IT Business Continuity Process

[KiwiChick]

Hi everyone, hope you can help!

I have been asked to write an ITIL continuity process. My ITIL expertise is in Service Support processes so I am struggling to write a continuity process, diagrams and text.

Is anyone out there kind enough to share their process with me? I am more than happy to share my service support processes in return.

Many thanks in advance!
KC

[Guerino1]

Hello KiwiChick,

This is different for every organization. However, what's more important than the diagrams and representations is the understanding of what's needed. I don't know the size of your enterprise but here are some things that help:

1) Identifiy the scope: Is it a complete disaster that wipes out one or more sites? Is it that one or more business units go down because of something that impacts your organization, like a system failing, a virus, or a denial of service attack? Etc. It's critical to understand what you're defining continuity for. An important part of this is understanding how much your enterprise is willing to spend on D&R and BCP.

2) Once you understand the scope and the allowable investment, work to understand what the requirements are, in the case where one of the events in #1 is triggered. For example, if a virus hits, what will you do to, both A) identify and eliminate the virus, while B) Keeping the business up and running via a continuity process, while getting it back to its original state.

3) How will you train everyone and ensure that they understand their roles in the event of a disaster?

4) Where will you keep redundant copies of your contact sheets, continuity processes, recovery processes, etc.?

5) How will everyone be contacted, in the event that a disaster strikes?

6) How will you practice your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans? They need to be tested, regularly.

7) Start documenting.

This is just scratching the surface of everything you will need to accomplish. Good luck!

Regards,
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[KiwiChick]

Thanks for that Frank.

I'm in a slightly different situation with this, whereby I have a client who just wants a best practise "straw man" diagram of an IT Business Continuity process. So while the things you've mentioned are applicable in a normal organisational structure, it doesn't really help me in this particular situation!

But thank you anyway for taking the time to reply.

Cheers
KC

[Guerino1]

KC,

No problem. If you're looking for nothing more than bare bone templates and flows, you can buy a number of different books that cover such things. I know Barnes & Noble has a number that show up if you search on "business continuity".

Good Luck,
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